Who needs me now?

From my 2022 archive:

Instead of having an evening to contemplate the past year and process the fact that I have cancer and am about to have a pretty big surgery, I spent the time picking up three people in my life, a family member with his own devastating diagnosis, a co-worker who needed a friendly ear, and my once again drunk husband, who needed money and supervision to get home safely.

I take pride in my role to care for others. It gives me purpose. But I find it impossible to say ‘no’ and man oh man is it draining. Taking on other people’s burdens has caused me a lot of stress that certainly doesn’t help my own health and well-being. As a healthcare provider, I’m the only one left in my family who has medical knowledge and so I have become the go-to person for everyone’s problems. I research for them, go to appointments with them, and help them interpret the test results they receive before their doctors are available to give them the results and whatever news comes along with the results. Trust me, the last thing I ever thought I’d have to do was to tell a family member that they have metastatic cancer, and then help them navigate the ridiculously complex healthcare system. Let alone get diagnosed with cancer myself less than a year later. All while working full-time, being a mom, wife, daughter, breadwinner, household manager, and person doing my best to manage my chronic illness, which already makes me feel like I’m a professional patient.

Part of the reason for starting to write this blog is to help others and myself to find balance in life. It really is true that you can’t take care of others unless you take care of yourself first. I put myself last most of the time, and that was very harmful to both my physical and mental health. I’m convinced (and there is data to support this) that the intense stressors in my life in the 5 years leading up to my cancer diagnosis had an impact on my physical health in a way I never imagined. In a future post, I’ll share some of the data supporting the role of stressors in the development of cancer and other chronic conditions.

I consider myself very lucky to have entered the healthcare field. It was mostly my own experience having T1d since childhood that drew me there, and likely saved my life more than once as these newer life-threatening issues have arisen. The healthcare system is broken and really hard to navigate. I would have fallen through the cracks a few times if I didn’t have the knowledge and the connections through my own career. I just wish I had the answers on how to fix it.